Minecraft VR version 2
by 13swabra
Summary: a rewrite of my original story with several major changes since it is no longer considered canon. This version has been updated with more back-story, more detailed information regarding several events, and much better grammar.
1. Chapter 1

_Author's notes: okay, so because when I first did this story I was just getting into writing, half of it could have turned out much better. Let me get this clear now, this uses parts of the original Minecraft engine for the first while, but after a while you don't see much of the original game except in enemies, so if you want a story based solely off the original game, please leave. If you do want a character in my story, you are welcome to pm me or leave a review, but since the actual story itself is finished, your character will be in a side story, and depending on how much people like your character, I might message you asking if I can use it on a different story._

Chapter one: The first day

Ten years after the first virtual reality, or VR software was mass produced, Minecraft was announced to be in the process of being adapted to this format. A lot of the core features were to remain the same, but players were promised online play would be a major focus, and many new types of items would be introduced, along with the world generation software being fixed to provide much smoother environments. My story begins here; my name when I entered the beta was (Player). I didn't want any of the people online to learn my name. With my luck, I would end up becoming friends with someone far away, and I couldn't afford to move right now.

This was it, I thought. This was going to be the first day of the Minecraft VR beta. I would be among the lucky few to get to play this game ahead of time, and maybe even influence the final version a little bit. Because it was a test, and the game was to be cleared as quickly as possible, each and every beta tester was promised a chest with all the basics, as well as an ability that would likely help them clear the game. That all sounded nice, but I was still weary, the difficulty was said to be set equivalent to the normal setting from the very start, and I had just recently been able to get into the Nether in the computer version on the same setting.

If I was right, then the main reason I was allowed into this test had to do with the software I was using. It was absolutely top of the line, the best money could buy. But even though we had it, we were still pretty broke, we needed it for another reason. My thoughts whirled around for a couple of minutes until my watch finally told me we had hit 7 p.m. the time when the beta testers were allowed into the game at last.

When I logged into the game using the testers log in I was given, I was greeted by a tree. No, quite literally, I was on top of a giant tree, looking straight at a bigger tree. I looked around quickly, my chest was nowhere. Someone must have grabbed it while I was staring at the tree. I studied the various statistics that were brought up by pushing two fingers together, then pushing one up and one down, as was common for most V.R. games right now. The first option was statistics, which allowed me to set up how I saw the various menus and bars that were normally displayed. After I was done fiddling around to get that to work how I wanted, I looked at the rest of the options, there was inventory, crafting, help, glossary, and log out. The inventory and crafting worked similar to the PC edition, even though crafting was done in a separate menu.

I was pretty lucky though, considering I had spawned in a forest biome, which was my personal favorite. I always loved the fact that you could get as much wood as you needed, and you were hidden from most people unless they went looking for you. Everywhere I could see was trees, but far off in the distance I could see a small lake I could use for farming. Thankfully harvesting base ingredients was as simple as touching it a few times, as I would probably have died if I jumped from that height. When I got to the ground I had a massive stack of wood, and after I took out enough trees that I could move around decently, I had enough to build at least a basic shelter. There was a better way to work with it though.

Crafting was probably one of my favorite things to do in game, as it resulted in my decent stack of wood turning into a crafting table, sticks, and planks, while still leaving a bunch of wood spare in case I needed it later on in the day, which I wouldn't be very surprised if I did. Looking around the area, I found an area with a decent amount of exposed stone, which I took as a sign that a mine there would be a good idea. I placed the crafting table nearby, and then looked as I was given all the tool options, as well as everything else a crafting table could make with a 3 by 3 grid. I crafted my pickaxe; it fit quite nicely in my hands, and harvested the stone I needed with great ease.

Next I crafted myself a furnace, and placed it right beside my crafting table, creating a very small working area. It provided a nice amount of light, but it wasn't needed for that, I was going to need to eat soon, as there was still hunger to account for. My main problem was that I really didn't know where I could find any animals to hunt right now. Before I went out though, I crafter myself a sword, which fit into my hands like it was always supposed to be there. I went down into the forest to go hunting.

Oh yeah, before I forget, I should mention that the world wasn't blocky anymore. Items were still harvested as blocks mostly, but when they connected with a piece, they changed to make the environment smoother and more natural looking. Because of this, things like hills were much easier to see up, and items like stairs were an aesthetic piece, instead of a way to avoid a lot of annoyance.

Eventually I found a chicken, which looked slightly more squared than usual, but still looked close to reality. I was starting to get slightly annoyed at the fact that my items and my own body were so square, but really, the rest of the area looked so nice I didn't feel like complaining too much. That didn't stop me from swearing a fair bit when the chicken I was hunting ran around a bunch when I fought it.

The next chicken I found was on the edge of the cliff, which wasn't smoothed down nearly as much, so it was an even bigger pain to chase it around. After the third Chicken, I was forced to wander around for a while, completely lost.

When I got back, I suddenly remembered that I didn't have any coal, and as such would be forced to use up my wood storage to create charcoal, which was really a huge waste unless you absolutely needed the items now. Unfortunately, three points till I started losing health classified as an emergency, so I had to create the charcoal. As I waited, I reflected back on the real world.

I recently had my fifteenth birthday, something like a month or two ago. Unfortunately, just a couple of weeks ago celebrated the third year since mom and dad broke up. Mom always said it was because they were always fighting, but of course it was over stupid little things. My dad wanted to be in charge of everything, and my mom liked to stay I charge of her own business. That always caused problems. I probably didn't help much either though, seeing as I was usually getting in trouble at school.

I didn't quite understand what the problem was. Half of the time it was over relatively stupid things, like not telling the teachers things about me when they asked. Once a teacher asked me flat out what my problem was, and that she deserved some respect as a teacher. I told her she was wrong, and she asked how I thought so. Apparently telling her that I only told people I trusted with the kind of information she was asking for. She pulled the old, I'm a teacher, and you're allowed to trust me. Then I told her that I didn't trust people that ask for trust that flat out as a matter of principal. Apparently, I did something wrong, cause that was the last straw, my parents split up soon after, and my life started to revolve around computers instead of people.

My favorite games were always single player. Everything followed a script, and you didn't have to worry about saying something dumb. My favorite of all games though was Minecraft. The only humans in it existed solely to benefit me, and aside from that, killing anything was easy. Building all the different items provided its own form of entertainment. But for some reason I never did take it off the easy difficulty until recently. When I did, the sheer strength of the old foes was amazing, and I spent half my time fighting. Sending that pain into something else was amazing, and something you couldn't do to real people.

Honestly, I probably would have gotten into fights for a lot longer than I did if my dad wasn't originally a really cool guy. He practiced martial arts, and often let me practice with him until I was ten. We never did fight each other though; he always told me that we trained our bodies to strengthen our minds. It would have been nice if he had continued, but when I hit ten years old, something in him snapped, and he stopped coming with me to train. Eventually he grew lazy, and shut down the training area, saying it was too much work, and that it would be better for everyone if it closed down.

After that, I lost a lot of my self-control for a while, and started getting into trouble. After a while, everyone started to call me the lone wolf, he who walks in the moonlight. Honestly, I liked the name. It made me sound powerful. But eventually, I noticed that I was always alone. It was a weird feeling, and for a while I hated it. Eventually though, I adopted the persona everyone chose for me. I shut everyone out, and I stopped getting into trouble.

On the downside though, the idiot teachers kept forcing me to work in groups with people, so I was never as far away from them as I would like. A couple of times, people tried to approach me, but by then, I had no clue how to talk with people, so they ended up leaving. Thus, even when I decided to try to work with people again, I was shut out. Maybe I could use this beta test as a second chance, but then again, I would probably be shut out a second time.

When I turned around, the glow from the furnace was gone, so I could collect my charcoal. I switched the charcoal with the wood, and then cooked the chicken, which took far less time. I was glad of that too, because the chicken tasted amazing, like the best spices were cooked into it. I quickly finished off the food, noticing for the first time that night had fallen.


	2. Prelude to chaos

Chapter two: prelude to chaos

As I looked around the darkened landscape, my mind took in a lot of the tiny details I failed to notice before now. Because my base was set against a hill, it would be easily sieged by other players. All I had now totalled up to a half destroyed wooden sword to fight with, and no armor. Add onto all the other odds against me, I was playing a multiplayer game alone. To solve at least my weapon problem, I created a sword specifically for combat made out of stone.

Even though it was night, I wasn't quite ready to take on the skeletons and other enemies in the game right now, so I used my remaining charcoal and some sticks to create a huge stack of torches, which was used to create light around my campground. The lighting system was amazing, with the torches not only illuminating the ground below, but even the air around them, resulting in a lower intensity light that looked more natural than even torches I had seen in the real world. These torches provided me with just enough protection that I could harvest several more trees in the night. I could really build a nice house here.

My main problem with spending time on things like houses in the original game was that they were a really big drain on resources. People would also get attached to their houses, and spend way more materials fixing it properly, or building an extension then what was really needed. Add to that, it made it so that you had someplace you wanted to return to constantly slowed down your progress by a lot. Then there was the type of person who would screw around making things for no reason other than to waste time and resources. If they had that much time, they really should have focused on beating the game instead.

Speaking of which, I really should focus on clearing the game myself, and next up on that side of things was going to be getting access to some armor. Almost all of my remaining sticks were turned into ladders, with a considerable amount of wood helping as well. I had just made it down about five blocks when suddenly the ground opened up beneath me into a giant cavern. I didn't spend much time studying the scenery down here though, mostly because when I hit the ground, I happened to hit right near a skeleton, which immediately shot me in the arm with an arrow. For a brief second, I saw a bar circling its head shrink a fair bit, then it disappeared. Thankfully I had my stone sword though, if I was using the wooden sword, my erratic swordsmanship would have gotten me killed.

Almost right after that though, I was stuck dealing with a zombie, who thankfully was rather slow, but it still managed to ram into me a couple times before it died. A spider attacked next, it was taken down rather quickly as well. When I looked at my health though, it was dangerously low. I skirted around quickly, using a pickaxe I had made earlier to gather all the iron I could find, creating a pillar above ground, and then I ran as fast as I could until I left my mine.

Once I got a hold of myself, I thought back on the three enemies I had just fought. They seemed a little too weak for the normal difficulty setting, almost like the damage was reduced for some reason or another. This didn't bode well for future trips down, seeing as the spawn rate for enemies was probably higher to compensate for the lack of strength they had. My iron armor set got its boots, which once again seemed to be the exact right size somehow. Either I was really lucky, or the system adapted the armor to fit how the player looks.

The next couple of trips down were rather uneventful, I dropped down into the mine, took enough items to get my set working, then left. Following that set up, my entire set was completed rather quickly, molding to my body like usual. With this, I should be able to fight until I found diamonds, which I considered the mid-game portion of Minecraft.

When I was about to go to fight a couple of mobs, my body started to slow down dangerously. Next thing I knew, I was picking myself off the ground in a plaza with a ton of people I didn't know. Well, the fact that I didn't know anyone enough to recognize them probably contributed to that, but at any rate, if this was some sort of event or joke or something, I really wasn't amused.

When I looked away from the crowd, I saw a group of creepers surrounding the area we were in. There were simple crafting tables everywhere, and when I approached one of them, a new item appeared in my inventory. I didn't pay much attention to its costs or anything like that; I just created the item, put it in my inventory, and waited for others to do something.

Soon enough, menus flashed in front of us, I read what it said

_Dear honored beta testers_

_I am the creator of this world, and you are now under the control of the human emotion studies department of your government. If you wish to complain to my superiors, go ahead, they will do nothing unless you prove to us why you deserve to inherit this planet. The rules are simple, you must clear this game, this is achieved similar to the regular game, except with a lot more powerful enemies, including the final boss, who by the way, has 8 tablets scattered throughout the game telling you a little about it. If any person in this game dies, then they will be immediately disconnected from the services of both Minecraft games, and further connections to the VR network by any member of your household will be considered illegal, and as such, the entire family will be charged. And just in case anyone was wondering, if anyone was to stay offline for more than a week at a time, I will personally take control of their character, and destroy it, achieving the loss needed for disconnection. With all that being said, in order to help those with the potential to become the leaders of the next generation, I have a gift for you all, please wait for the creepers to advance, and you will regain control of your body. Have a nice day, and see you at the end of the game, if you make it there that is._

Well damn, this guy just made this game a hell of a lot more complicated. If anyone took major risks now, they would be risking a lot, since by now VR ran pretty much everything. Anyone who lost their connection would be forced to live like they were homeless, and would be unable to buy anything, since even that was controlled by VR by now.

I noticed something else, that item I made must have been the gift he was talking about. The main problem was that I really had no clue what it was, and I couldn't check right now, because true to that guy's word, I couldn't move my body in order to activate the necessary commands to open the menu. As I looked around, there was pass panic, even if nobody could move, their facial expressions generally said that they were worried now, and I couldn't blame them. I was amazed at myself for being able to keep my own cool here.

Once about five minutes passed, everyone in the plaza looked like they had read the note. Another five seconds passed, and the lock on our bodies was released. On instinct, I put on the new item I had made, and it split into five parts, one for each of the armor slots, and a brand new sword. The main problem was that I lost everything I was holding, and got some scrolls in return. Then I remembered the creepers were advancing, and had just enough time to notice the crowd moving around before everyone began yelling at once

"What, how did that kid hack, he must be cheating"

"Trying to get all the glory, huh, Cheater"

"Players a cheater"

"Even the game master must have known he was bad news"

Everyone was paying too much attention to their insults to notice the danger. As I slipped away, I was followed by several creepers, which I slashed away. Only when I got back to my base did I notice just how strange this situation was. The game master was given permission to force every beta tester in the game into what was basically a death game. The game was developed solely to create the leaders of the next generation by getting people to fight each other. And to top it off, we really didn't know anything about the enemies we would be facing.

Then I looked at my items for a moment, and was surprised to notice that the pixelated effect was gone. My sword was pitch-black, with a leather handle. It was the regular two edged style common for Minecraft swords, but I could easily hold it in one hand. My armor had likewise been replaced with a trench coat or something like that stained black. I now had a sheath for my blade at my waist, and my armor was covering around the same amount of my body, even though it lost its pixilation. It was also dyed in black. When I opened my menu, all of my gear had the word stained in front of whatever they were, so I had the stained set.

When I went back to the zone where everyone had gathered before, it was a giant crater, with various items left around. I managed to get a bunch of wooden planks, as well as a bunch of the armor set items, none of them activated yet. By what the area looked like, I wouldn't be very surprised if at least seventy percent of the people in that plaza didn't even survive to look at what the present was.

My left hand clenched automatically. I didn't like people very much, but the kind of person I hated most of all was the kind of person who liked to pretend that they were a god of some sort. This creator guy made it clear he thought of himself like that based off of how he worded his message. He was the examiner, we were the subjects. If I could tell him something right now, I would have told him I looked forward to kicking his ass.

First things first though, I needed to set up a house to store all my items, even if it was a massive drain on my resources. The house I built had two floors, on the bottom was storage, on the top was where all my item creation/enchanting gear. This way even if the house was attacked, I would know before they got to my enchanting room, which people were fond of blowing up whenever I played on a multiplayer server.

If I was going to beat this now, I would need to get used to fighting, and fast. At the moment, only my mine fulfilled all those needs. Because of this, I ignored a nagging doubt at the back of my mind, and went underground to train.


	3. Solitary Thoughts

Chapter three: Solitary Thoughts

_**Authors' notes: **__thankfully this chapter was partly done already, so I managed to finish this, please note though, that I am not likely to be able to do chapters often anymore, since this semesters diploma courses are a lot harder than I expected, and school has to come before stuff like this._

Well, when I reached the bottom of the mine, I ended up in the middle of a skeleton meeting of some sort. Of course, that wasn't what really was happening, but by the sheer abundance of them, it might as well have been. I raced up the stairs, for a while my mine would have to be closed down. With my main source of training removed for a while, I would have to risk running into another player if I wanted to train myself. I gave myself a few seconds to curse my bad luck before setting off.

Thankfully, I didn't have far to go before I ran into a skeleton. Now that I was fighting one in slightly less stressful conditions then last time, I could afford to study how it looked better. Skeletons were roughly the same size as the player, but without skin, or muscles. Because of that, when they moved, the bones scraped against each other, making it a lot harder for a skeleton to sneak up on a target. Unfortunately, skeletons were able to compensate for that with their default bow, which gave them far greater range then a swordsman could ever hope to achieve. The trick was always to get in close to them, and then attack before it could retreat to a safer range.

Now then, I'm pretty glad that nobody was watching me, because my first swing managed to completely miss the skeleton, but happened to create the momentum needed for me to crash into the skeleton. Somehow I managed to turn in a complete circle as I did this, slashing into the skeleton with enough force that the damage was considered a critical hit. When the system calculated damage, the skeletons body sagged, like it was having trouble keeping its body together without the muscles and skin forcing the bones together. I kinda felt sorry for the skeleton, but I really couldn't afford to die here, so I slashed it once more, somehow pulling it off successfully this time.

The skeleton didn't fall to the ground like before; instead it kind of faded, like it had lost the ability to exist instead of getting its body destroyed. After there was nothing left of the complete skeleton, I looked down, and gathered the arrow and solitary bone left behind by the skeleton. It was weird, but I really couldn't bring myself to consider the skeletons my enemy. The skeletons had no hatred for me or anything, but they were going to keep hunting me, because that's all they could do. Really, the skeletons weren't that different then the players, both were acting out the script that the creator chose for them, because neither group really had a choice.

For a while, I sat around and thought. Everything in this world was basically a slave to the guy who created the game. The land existed to bear witness to our trials. The denizens of this world were forced to fight us; they had no choice in the matter. And lastly, the players, who would be forced into battle time and again before this all ended. And the players had another role to play, for it was their choices that would affect how the world ended.

When I got up, I was faced with a lone zombie, it was holding its arms out pitifully, like it was waiting for someone to hold it, like someone would have done in life if it was even allowed that. This was another being I would be forced to fight, all the emotion I could muster towards the zombie was pity, it was forced to fight with a body that had long since earned their rest, and were being controlled to fight us. My blade crossed across the zombie twice before it could even register it was hit, and then it too faded into darkness, this time leaving nothing behind to tell of its passing.

Within five minutes, I met up with the one enemy in this world I never did consider worth anything but hatred. I was face to face with a creeper, an entity whose sole purpose in existing was to destroy anything, even itself, for the chance to kill. Its appearance was similar to that of a skinny cactus; however it had a mouth, even though the only purpose for such a thing was for the creeper to scare it's victims with. For this, I charged forwards, and ripped through its body, running past it until I left the area where it could explode. Once its timer reset, I rushed it a second time, my blade saluting the moon as the creepers body dissolved like the other creatures I had fought.

Once the sun rose, I turned the last of my wood, along with a cache of stone I had gathered into a house. Despite my objections to houses on the regular game, now that I would be spending a lot of time here, I decided to create the house as an attempt to recreate a sense of normalcy that would otherwise be missing from this hell we were supposed to be calling a game. The house I made was two stories tall, on the top was all of my storage, while the bottom held things like the crafting table that I could replace if I needed to. I also made a bedroom, it was a waste of resources or sure, but it helped the house to feel a little more like a home instead of the prison the rest of the game was starting to feel like.

After everything was done, I checked my inventory, and sure enough, I had an extreme excess of seeds. Seeds were usually considered a worthless investment, since the bread they made didn't recover much hunger, but personally I liked them. The process for farming them was simple, and you could do anything else you wanted to do while they were growing, so I could wander wherever I felt like going, and I would always have food when I got back. To create my style of a farm, I first flattened out a 7 by 7 blocks square 20 blocks from my house, so that anything that got rid of either the farm or my house wouldn't be able to get the other. Next, every second block in the square was destroyed, so the 1, 3, 5, and 7 lines were 1 block higher than the rest. Using a bucket, the 2, 4, and 6 lines were put under water, saturating the heightened ground. The seeds went on the higher ground, creating 28 squares of harvestable wheat if all of them were harvested at once.

I didn't feel quite like sitting around to wait for the wheat to grow though, so I logged off to tell my mother myself about what had happened in the game. She told me that there was some sort of governmental assistance for the players, if we were to stay online for more than three days, the government would pay to have us shipped to some state of the art hospital. It took a long time, but she managed to convince me that I should take them up on their offer, mostly by reminding me it would probably allow me to kick the crap out of the creator sooner than if I was continuing my regular activities.

After that was settled, I logged back online, knowing fully well that I was going to be living in this world for a long amount of time. As I had expected, my wheat was fully grown, so I was able to get enough food to recover my hunger bar to full, with a lot left over for fighting. Thankfully, it was still dark, so I managed to get rid of the creepers around my house, which was thankfully functioning as a decent reference point to help me avoid getting lost. Adding to that, since I was stuck here for a while, I would be forced to act like this was my real house.

Several times, I was attacked by the undead, whose defeat should have brought me happiness, but the look on their faces was too human for me to hate, so each kill seemed empty, I was fighting to survive, but really, I didn't need to do very much. Someone else would probably clear the game long before I could, so I could easily train here, and only show myself for the final battle. That way I would have the least risk factor possible, and I would still get a share of the glory. That plan bothered me a little, but considering how much my family depended on VR to stay afloat, I couldn't afford to risk rushing in to areas like the Nether unprepared.

One thing I was concerned about was the equipment I had gained from the games creator. The equipment set I had obtained had about the damage reduction and stats as iron, but for some reason, it wasn't taking any damage from the multiple attacks I was taking. My sword had the same thing happening with it. The entire suit was really dark though, it almost seemed to blend in with the darkness whenever I was fighting outside in the night. Thanks to that gift, I really didn't need my mine for anything other than diamond armor for the extra defensive capabilities it offered me, as well as the option of enchanting, which was always a tempting idea.

Over the next two weeks, I went out hunting whenever I could, I would constantly practice with my sword until I could move the blade however I wanted with relative ease. After a while, I stopped making mistakes, and creepers stopped appearing around my area as often. That being said though, several times a night, I would be awoken by far off sounds. I figured they were probably remnants of memories from reality, since once or twice a day, I would go in that direction for a couple of minutes, and I never did find anything. Either I went the wrong way, or whatever I was hearing was hidden very well.

Eventually I got bored, and started wishing that whoever was on the front lines would have to hurry, or everyone who was playing the game would probably quit trying to get stronger. After that happened, we would have no front line, and we would time out long before we were ready to take on the final boss. With that in mind, it would be no good to sit around here waiting. If I wanted to get out, I was going to have to start gathering people together, and form the front lines myself. If I could do that, then maybe clearing at least this one world would be possible. I had no clue how many players there were left in the game now, but a force of at least five very skilled people would be needed for each world, and even then, the last boss would need at least forty people working together if we were to stand a chance at beating it. The first step we had would have to be here though.

After I decided on that, I went around the area I had memorized, looking for every place that could lead to an advantage for me. Several times that day, I felt like I was being followed, but I never did manage to find what it was. I was having trouble searching for people to join the front line as well. It looked like everyone who was teleported to the plaza from earlier had vanished, or gotten killed. That wouldn't be a good prospect; I definitely need help to clear this world.


End file.
